


Turquoise and Gunmetal

by glasscamellias



Category: MOTHER: Cognitive Dissonance
Genre: Body Paint, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Spoilers, only a little canon angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 04:46:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13942890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscamellias/pseuds/glasscamellias
Summary: He might have moved from visual art to music, but it was hard to stop thinking about painting. Luckily (?) Larice offered him a chance to practice on a new medium.





	Turquoise and Gunmetal

Alinivar first got the idea on Jupiter.

In the middle of buying supplies (food, oil cans, all the explosives Zarbol had his sights on), he had seen a box in the corner, half open to displace the products inside. They looked like regular oil paints, and there was a limited color selection, but he couldn’t help examining them with growing interest and guilt. Ever since picking up guitar, he hadn’t painted much. Wasn’t it more important to focus on a hobby that actually had practical combat use?

But a few paints, two brushes, and a small canvas wouldn’t take up that much room, right? He could drop them off when they passed by the base, and it’d be waiting for him once everything was over. They had more than enough money to cover it, though he still found himself turning to block the display with his body so that the others wouldn’t notice.

He lasted a few days without thinking about it too much. It was easy when he had left it back in the ship while they explored Jupiter more thoroughly, though he couldn’t help wondering if anyone left behind would mess with it when he wasn’t around. They _were_ his friends (...right?), but it wasn’t such a strange worry to have: his very first paints poured out on the ground while the other mooks around him laughed...

When they finally got back, he rushed to the corner where he had stored the paints, hidden behind a tangle of his other stuff, not that there was much other than spare guitar strings. The paint hadn’t been tampered with, but even in his relief, there was the nagging feeling that next time he wouldn’t be so lucky. He only had the one small canvas to work on, and there was no way he could use all that paint for a single painting, but at least some of it wouldn’t be wasted if the rest came to an unfortunate end.

There was plenty of time to paint in the void between Jupiter and Mars, and he found himself painting the Point of Power that they had just finished. Maybe he could make a series and depict all of them? Even if it took him time to get more canvas, each location they had found had been etched into his mind, and he was sure that he would be able to recreate all of them from memory. That would require them to find the rest, of course, but they were doing well so far.

Forgoing the brushes, he dipped his tentacles into two of the paint containers scattered around him and got to work. The colors weren’t quite right for the red storm of Jupiter, and the closest he had was a pale orange, but he decided to go with it: a slightly color-shifted depiction of the Red Eye. A cliff with grass that was more bluish than the real thing, and the blurred silhouettes of the four of them, peering over the edge into the void. He felt a little worse that he didn’t have the right colors for his friends, but it would be just as bad to leave them out of the painting. Maybe someday he could redo this? For the full effect, he definitely needed metallic paints for Zarbol and Larice, not just white and black paint mixed together into a murky, substandard gray. And the right shade of peach for Colonel Saturn...

He was so focused on trying to recapture the swirls in the sky that he didn’t hear Larice approaching until he spoke up. The ship was too small for him to teleport across, which was a far more distinctive sound than his normal movements. Apparently Alinivar had been too transfixed to hear his usual low whirring. “What are you working on?”

“Oh!” He startled, a bit of blue paint splattering off his tentacle and onto Larice’s leg. He didn’t seem concerned about it as he sat down beside Alinivar.

“I’m so sorry, um--” He fumbled for a stray cloth to wipe it away, but Larice raised a hand.

“It’s fine, I don’t mind it.” Shouldn’t he, though? It was so out of place on his metal body. Didn’t it look dirty to him? “I wanted to see what you were doing.”

“Oh. Um, I was just painting what we saw on Jupiter, you know? I thought....it’d be a nice memory to capture...” This was the point when people usually turned away from him, not wanting to hear about artwork. Larice was too nice to laugh at him, but he would lose interest and leave, now that he had his answer.

He didn’t leave. Instead, he leaned over to examine the painting, for much longer than he would have expected. Did he actually like it, or was he just faking? “It looks like the real thing, but the colors aren’t right,” Larice finally said. “I’m sorry, I know very little about art. Was that intentional?”

“W-well, I only have these colors, it’s all I have to work with.” He couldn’t tell if Larice liked it or not.

“Do you need more colors of paint? I’m sure there has to be some available in the galaxy.” He said it as if it would be perfectly reasonable to spend important quest time and funds looking for paint.

“I’m fine with just these! I don’t have anything else to paint on, so there’s no point in getting more that I’d only have to save without anything to put it on.”

Larice stared at the canvas, head tilted. “Is this all you can paint on? I suppose, since it’s not quite our ship, you can’t decorate it, but there has to be something else.” He seemed to remember the blue paint smeared on his leg, and he looked down at it. “You could use me as a canvas, if you’d like.”

“What?!” He wanted to think that they were friends now, but wasn’t that still too personal? Just because he was metal and not fully organic didn’t make it any less strange. “But if I mess it up...”

“You didn’t mess that up.” Larice gestured to the painting of Jupiter. “It wasn’t exactly against regulation for Starmen to decorate themselves, in some places, but the culture of Giegue’s ship basically forbid it. Whatever design you make, I’d be happy to display it.”

Even if Larice wanted it, he couldn’t arguing about it. “I didn’t expect to paint on metal, so I don’t have any primer. Oil paint won’t last that long, especially when we keep getting into fights...”

“So repaint it whenever it wears off. Then you’ll have an excuse to buy more paints, won’t you?” His voice was as monotone as it always was, yet he somehow sounded...smug??

How could he be okay with someone painting his literal body, multiple times no less? All Larice had seen of his work was this painting and the one hanging in Alinivar’s room back at base, but he was okay carrying it around on his body? But he was waiting expectantly, so Alinivar conceded defeat. Surely after one painting, he would decide that he didn’t actually want it touched up after all, and it would wear away completely. “Is there a design you want me to do?”

“I’m not the most creative person,” Larice said, with a long, contemplative beep. “Do whatever you’d like.”

That certainly put a lot of pressure on him, but he wiped off his tentacles to reach for the blue paint. Green would have been more helpful, as he started to trace swirling vines along Larice’s legs, but this would have to do. He tried not to think about running his tentacles across Larice’s body. It was easier to think of it as another canvas and not his friend, as he started to paint gemblooms sprouting along the vine. He wasn’t sure if gemblooms actually came in white or orange, but it counted under creative license, right? The whole time, Larice sat perfectly still, with no risk of accidentally smearing anything. His only motions were the flickering lights in his visor, and Alinivar hoped that meant he was pleased.

He carried the design up Larice’s torso (making sure to cover over the crack where his emblem had been torn off) and down his right arm, before the blue paint started to get a little low. It wasn’t the biggest design, and there was still a lot of metal left plain, but Larice seemed happy as he surveyed himself. It looked like there was a little garden growing on him.

“Is it okay? I mean, if I had more, I think I could have done something more complex...”

“Alinivar.” Larice reached out and touched his tentacle, uncaring of the paint transfer between them. “Don’t worry so much. Thank you for using some of your paint on my whim. I look forward to your next design.”

With Larice carrying it around on him, it was impossible not to think about with growing excitement. What could he paint next? Would he have enough left over for another design? He would need to do something new once they were done on Mars; the rough terrain was already scraping away the paint on his legs.

But then Giegue and Greyface attacked, wrenching away Larice's control over his own programming. None of them could possibly hurt their friend, even when he rained psychic fire and comets down on them. It wasn’t his fault! He finally fell, gracelessly, a thin stream of smoke rising out of his visor, flowers scraping away as he hit the floor. Alinivar began sobbing as he edged around their fallen friend, and for once Colonel Saturn didn’t gently scold him for being soft. If none of them had attacked him, if there wasn’t clear physical damage, would healing PSI do anything at all? He cast some anyway, though his reserves were low.

It didn’t help, and none of them would have been able to carry his heavy, motionless body up the long ladder. There was no choice but to continue on.

\- 

...In the rush and the panic on escaping Earth, he hadn’t had much time to really look at what Larice had been upgraded to. He had almost forgotten about the whole thing when they finally managed to return to the ship, before he saw his painting fixed up on the wall in his absence.

Most paints wouldn’t show properly on black and red metal, but... He looked towards his friend, considering his options. There had to be fluorescent paint somewhere in the universe, right?

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote and revised this in a few hours on a whim, so it's somewhat messy and likely only interesting to me. And I don't know a lot about oil paint, since I'm not an artist. (I could argue that any inaccuracies are because it's alien oil paint, obviously!)


End file.
